


je me souviens de vous, mon capitaine

by gnx (LiesArePartiallyTrue)



Category: Black Sails
Genre: 4.10, Angst, Episode Tag, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-21
Updated: 2018-03-21
Packaged: 2019-04-05 17:18:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 938
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14049042
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LiesArePartiallyTrue/pseuds/gnx
Summary: Final moments between two men who had everything to lose.





	je me souviens de vous, mon capitaine

**Author's Note:**

> uh hi! i've been stewing over my feelings for this show for weeks this is hell
> 
> also this fandom is chock full of amazingly talented people and i am Intimidate™

 

 

 _Je me souviens de vous, mon capitaine, je m'en souviens très bien, et je revois encore distinctement la nuit de désarroi et d'abandon tomber sur vos yeux quand je vous ai appris... -- Jérôme_ _Ferrari_ , Où j'ai laissé mon âme

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

He'd told Flint once, “Do not ask me to choose between a war and a wifeˮ, and he knows Flint had caught his meaning then: _don't make me choose between you and her_ (maybe they'd both of them glossed over the obvious implications of that -- a wife for a husband, a matelot, a _partner_ \-- that ache in Silver's bones still, like the phantom pain of a missing limb).

 

Now, Silver thinks he might've chosen war yet – the cause is meaningless to him, in the face of losses he isn't eqipped to bear, but _oh_ , what he wouldn't give to sail beside Flint in a sea he hates; as Flint's right hand, as a part of his entity, for as long as he is able, before the day comes when it finally gets all blown to hell. Oh, what he wouldn't do to chase away that impossible expression on Flint's face, tied between anguish and plain, bone-deep exhaustion.

 

And Flint, he looks --

 

 _He looks broken_ , because Silver has snapped something vital between them; but he also looks somehow _hopeful_ , when he speaks of England and her monsters -- his eyes shine as if he wants desperately to impart, to impress his knowledge onto Silver, yet like he isn't talking to Silver at all, with a gaze cast far-away, glistening with his ideals. He looks so much older, like the father he'll likely never get to be; wisdom creases his gorgeous, open face, and, for the first time since he'd known him, Silver feels crushed with the weight of the years they have between them. Flint is his elder by maybe a decade, but in this moment, Silver thinks that it might be an entire _age_ that separates them.

 

Flint looks heartbroken and right and _beautiful_ , and if Silver got to keep only one memory of their time together, of Flint before he is unmade, before he is a man Silver cannot recognise, then it would be this -- it is not a pretty thing, rather it is ladden with betrayal and pain and something else unspoken, but Flint. _Flint looks so soulcrushingly beautiful_ , that he makes Silver want to drop to his knees, leg be damned, and _beg_ , plead to be absolved like he hasn't done in so long, since a time he was a child in story that doesn't matter. But he hasn't ever fallen to such sin, not in all of his thievery, not in all the lies, not even when he bashed a man's skull in with a metal shoe. No, because his biggest sin is this -- loving James Flint to the brim and breaking his heart still.

 

 

* * *

 

 

It is not the promise of seeing Thomas again that unmakes James Flint -- it is the trust he's placed in one John Silver.

 

Hope is not a thing James Flint has much of left, and there is no logical explanation Flint's brain can conjur for Thomas turning out to be alive -- How? Why? Why _now_ , after all the years that've passed?

 

Yet it is a truth universally acknowledged, that when John Silver says _jump_ , Flint says _how high_ ; and so he lets himself be shackled and spirited away to an unkown place, the epitome of civilisation's hypocrisy, where England hides her shames by simply erasing them from existence.

 

Flint's mind is _livid_ as he does it, _reeling_ at the very idea of succumbing to that which he has been fighting for _oh so long_ at the cost of _so much_ , but. It is what John Silver wants.  
So Flint becomes prisoner, forces himself to break away from all that _makes_ him, gives up his fight. Stops resisting. Let Silver take it however best suits him -- if what he needs is for James McGraw to be ressurected so he can bury James Flint and his, _damn it's their,_  war, so be it. That is what Flint will have him believe.

 

But he knows, with a vicious surge deep inside of him, that the days in which James Flint would have been unmade by Thomas Hamilton's life are gone, crested in the salt of every mile of sea Flint has sailed between then and now. There is a _cause,_ now, where only the aches and hollows of his loss used to reside, brought about by a perfect hole in the side of Miranda Barlow's head, as she screamed her pain and her revenge loud enough so the world might finally hear her.

 

Yet he is giving it all up, unmaking himself, shedding James Flint's skin, just as he's become comfortable in it like a tree's roots steady in the ground, as he's become grateful for the darkness he can pull from it, because John Silver knows his true friendship, and truer yet, his love. Because Flint is as much part of Silver as of James, and if Silver is ready to cut away at himself, then so will James have to be.

 

Likely Silver will never understand now that James would do anything for him, that the chains around James' wrists may mean what Silver says they mean or they may not, but if it is what he wants, James will give it; the last thing he would see Captain Flint do.

 

 

* * *

 

 

_I remember you, my captain, I remember it all very well, and I can still distinctly see the shadow of disarray and abandon fall over your eyes when I told you._

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> (rough translation of the french is by me) please shout to me abt bs and sf and annemax to me on tumblr (@gee-nx)


End file.
